As God created the heavens, the earth, and all living things, Genesis chapter one tells us He called His creation good. When He created humanity, God went further and deemed it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Surprisingly, in chapter two, God acknowledged an element of His creation as “not good”—“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’” (Genesis 2:18). Although Adam and God enjoyed perfect communion with each other in paradise—the kind of personal communion with God all Christians long for and sing about—this perfect, one-on-one relationship was not God’s complete plan for His people. From Adam came Eve, and from their union humanity came into a relationship. We understand the importance of human relationships and the value of community in the Creation story.
Christians often speak of having a personal relationship with Jesus, but we must not let this emphasis lead us to believe that worship and spiritual formation occur only in solitude. Our contemporary culture values individuality, and we may even begin to consider privacy a virtue in our spiritual life. Prioritizing and feeding our vertical relationship with God while ignoring, or even avoiding the horizontal relationship He desires for us to have with other believers may limit our fruitfulness and growth.
Scripture is clear about the importance of expressing our love for God (worship) both horizontally and vertically. The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) speak to the vertical and horizontal relationships in which God calls us to live. The first three commandments define how we are to express our love for God vertically—by focusing on our intimate, one-on-one relationship with Him. Commandments five through ten define how we are to express our love for God horizontally in our relationships with others. The fourth commandment, the Sabbath command, links these two vital aspects of our worship life. In worship, we respond to God’s gift of grace by responding in gratitude and presenting ourselves as a community, the Body of Christ, knit together by the Spirit and bound together by the acts of love we show each other because of our love for God. Christ summarized this quite simply in the Great Commandment, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37-39).
The Christian life of worship is marked not just by our individual beliefs in who God is but by how we ethically live out those beliefs with each other in community. The Ten Commandments and the Great Commandment define the dual nature of our relationship with God and with each other as worship. Through the Ten Commandments, God provided a blueprint by which our love for our neighbor expresses our love for God—making relationships integral for worship. Worship is simultaneously a vertical interaction with God and a horizontal interaction with our neighbor; we cannot approach it as a time of “God and I.” Rather, worship is simultaneously “God and I,” “I and we,” and “we and God.” These various relationship layers are formed and expressed in corporate worship services.
The weekly gathering of believers provides necessary opportunities for individual worshipers to give to and receive from a community. The importance of relationships and community reflects how humanity was created in the image of the triune God. As the body of Christ, we become the continued incarnational presence of Christ in the world. Understanding one’s relationship with God to be only, or primarily, a personal relationship without paying attention to the importance of communal interaction, dissects the Great Commandment into two unrelated ideas, further disregarding the symbiotic interrelatedness between loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Worship breeds community because, by nature, we were made in the image of a triune God, and the presence of the body of Christ is to be relational and, therefore, necessarily communal.
by Sacred Arts Director Jeff Faux
